Everyone knows that you can use the Internet to make money off your old things. It also seems like a thousand new online businesses spring up every day. Yet with such a bewildering array of websites available, figuring out where to sell stuff online can be a real challenge.

We’ve made our living selling via the Web for years. Over that time, we’ve learned that the best places to do it are . . .

1. eBay

You might need to use eBay if your garage has no room for your car.

eBay could well be considered the best place to sell stuff online. For starters, it’s second only to Amazon in numbers of active buyers and sellers (nearly 160 million). It is well-regulated, charges sellers significantly less than Amazon, and allows you to extensively customize things like your return policy.

2. Amazon

Amazon is the world’s most popular ecommerce website, raking in higher earnings than most brick-and-mortar retail chains. Nowhere on the Internet will you find more buyers waiting to pounce on your offers. It provides an exceptionally safe marketplace, and you can expect operations to run smoothly once you get started.

3. Craigslist

When the shipping would cost more than the item, it's time to use Craigslist.

Despite its reputation as a haven for scam artists, Craigslist is still one of the best places to sell stuff online. It rarely charges fees. That means you can make higher profits per sale than on eBay or Amazon.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of selling on Craigslist is its community-focused approach. It works more like the classified section of a newspaper than a global marketplace. This makes it perfect for selling large or heavy objects that would be cost-prohibitive to ship, as buyers can just swing by and pick them up.

5. Your Own Website

If you’re planning on selling for the long term and not just to clear out your basement, then creating your own website can be a great decision. The startup expenses are often high, and you may need to learn a thing or two about code and SEO, but it has enormous advantages.

You control everything when you make your own website. You choose or design your own layout, create your own return policy, and otherwise decide every aspect of how you do business. The only person who profits from your hard work is you.

I recommend starting with one or two of the previous options to get a feel for how ecommerce works. If you can generate a steady profit on those sites, then you may have what it takes to make it on your own.

The main downside to selling on eBay and Amazon is that customer support can get out of hand. You have to keep logging in and out of different websites, and some of them make it difficult or impossible to have more than one support agent working at a time. When you wind up in this situation, we recommend integrating with Zendesk so you can manage all of your customer service efforts from one place.

In Conclusion

Deciding where to sell stuff online is tough, but once you make your first sale things start to come naturally. I recommend selling something inexpensive on eBay or Amazon to get started.

Take the leap quickly, before you start second-guessing yourself and back out of this opportunity to make good money (or at least get rid of your old junk!). We dove in and we’ve never regretted it.

"ChannelReply has allowed us to increase the productivity of
our customer service department by consolidating the messaging
from multiple marketplaces directly into Zendesk. As with most
retail businesses, we sell on multiple online channels.
Streamlining customer interactions from these marketplaces
has been crucial to both our customers' experience and our growth.
ChannelReply has done a wonderful job in developing and supporting
this functionality."

JC Webster

COO, Chicago Music Exchange

"ChannelReply has allowed us to integrate multiple eBay and Amazon accounts
into Zendesk creating accountability and making it easy to scale our marketplace
customer service. Without ChannelReply it would be unmanageable to provide the
level of satisfaction our customers expect out of Golfio.
The integration with the eBay and Amazon messaging API is tight and we
couldn't be happier!"

Howard Choi

Business Dev Manager Golfio

"Given the various standards of service that apply, managing multiple marketplace
channels is a challenge to any organization. ChannelReply has given us the ability
to organize our inquries to maximize turnaround and increase our efficiency when
handling our marketplace requests. We look forward to additional features ChannelReply is offering that will only increase our ability to service our customers
across channels."